When a person writes a review for a game, does a preview, or a friend say’s to you they finished game X this week, one of the first questions people usually ask are was it fun? and how long was it?

People want to know before investing in a game how much time they are going to have with it before they reach the end point of the game, or is it endless like an MMO or puzzle game. For a lot of people they can only afford, or have the time to play so many games a year so they want to know which game will give them the most game play for their dollars. Just like with movies people want to know beforehand how much time they will need to invest to get to the end. Nothing feels worse than to spend your monthly game budget on something that you beat in a few hours and have nothing to play until the next month.

The time we will invest in a game to get to the end is such an important decision in a games purchase I’m still surprise that game boxes don’t have an estimated play time label on them. I’m sure one reason why is simply because of the nature of the medium being so dependent on variables during game play it’s hard to say a game will take a certain amount of time to complete. When you factor in the genre, the persons skill, side quests and a plethora of other factors it makes it impossible to give an accurate estimation on how long it would take a person to play a game to completion. Because of all these and many other variables it would take the industry as a whole to adopt a guide line of what is to be included when deciding a games play time. Would you just say it will take X hours to go from start to finish without exploring any? But have a +X hours for side quests? What about the person who skips every line of text or FMV that comes up? Do you add an excluding story elements warning? What about when a person gets to a part of a game where they keep dying, how can you accurately estimate something like that? You can’t.

The only way I could see this coming into effect would be if Sony or Microsoft decided to make it another standard developers had to meet in order to publish games on their system. Just like the ESRB label, the player count label, or the HD resolution label they would have to include an estimated time to completion label. The key word there is estimated. They would have to base it on the few variables that they know of and make it clear what is and is not included. Perhaps something like the example to the left..

 

Artistic talent aside-- I just woke up so all you get today is a box-- there isn’t a whole lot that can be shown to tell the buyer what was included or excluded when coming up with the play time given the lack of space on boxes. As seen on the above box there is just so much stuff all over the place it looks like one of those NASCAR driver suits that has AD’s over every square inch of their bodies. It can be a very intimidating and scary thing to look at for people who are just new to gaming or sometimes even for long time players as it is just so busy. Perhaps one more box, even one that contains as valuable information as how much time you will get out of the game, is just one box too many. Maybe the reason we don’t have them now isn’t because they don’t want to, or didn’t think of adding it, but because there simply isn’t enough space on the boxes for it. Maybe we just can’t get these things added until we get a new box design for our games, or when we get an online distribution scheme. If you are looking at a web page for the game instead of a small box you’re holding in your hands there is an infinite amount of space for information to aid in your purchasing decision.

Perhaps it is just as simple as the medium doesn’t lend itself to a time stamp. Or perhaps there is just a deeper meaning I’m overlooking here then how long a game will last. Does it really matter how long a game will last you as long as you’re having fun while playing it? Does a game’s worth increase or decrease based on if the number of hours label on a box is bigger than one over another s? What about a fun time label for the box? Will I have fun the whole time I play the game or just for 5-10 minutes every hour that I play?

Personally I still believe some way to let the person who is going to buy a game know roughly how long a game will last them without needing to have been reading reviews online, hunting message boards or having a big enough network of people who play every game that comes out is important. Of course the most important part of buying a game should be will I have fun with it and not how long it will last. But with games costing as much as they do and with the obvious problems going on right now buying a $60 game that will last for 10 hours of fun then be over may not be as important to a person as buying another $60 game that will last 80 hours and be fun most of the time.

In the end I guess it comes down to what’s more important to you personally. Which of the two is more fun. Do you even like to play the type of games that go for 10 hours or 80 hours? Maybe you can replay that 10 hour game over 8 times and have just as much fun as the 80 hour game. At the moment it seems to just come down to doing your research before you go buy something and hoping that the gamble we all take when buying a game ends with you having fun with whatever game you bought. In the end we buy and play games to have fun don't we?